Wakandan Ingenuity
by Rokhal
Summary: How do you heal a man's mind while he is frozen in cryostasis? Nobody knows, but if anyone can do it, it's Wakanda. T'Challa holds a nation-wide talent search to fix Bucky, so he can avoid dealing with his grief for his father.


Author's Note: This is what happened after I got super excited about Black Panther as portrayed in CA:CW and I went off on a year-long African History research binge. Absolutely worth it because I never learned any of that in school. I had loads of fun, but I'm never going to finish the rest of the epic, so here is Act I. I think it stands ok on its own. It does end in a series of bullet points, so you can know where the rest of it was going.

This story and the Wakanda I portray are inspired by what I could glean from Marvel wikis, and informed by the historical events that affected the societies and nations that Wakanda would have been surrounded by, if it existed. A lot of this (90% of this) is made up. The Wakandan dates are an arbitrary number chosen to begin early in recorded human history. I don't know what calendar system they use in Marvel, so I gave them the Coptic calendar used in Ethiopia. The words I used were selected from a somewhat arbitrary selection of languages in use in tropical East and Central Africa. But every surrounding nation, every historical invasion, is real.

* * *

T'Challa's disappointment in James Barnes was petty, and he knew it.

Barnes had siphoned off what little mental energy T'Challa could spare during their retreat to Wakanda and the weeks of official and private mourning that followed. Before T'Challa retrieved his jet to depart Siberia for Finland, T'Challa sacrificed precious seconds to help Rogers wrap insulating tape around the shorted wires in Barnes' ruined shoulder that caused the man such obvious agony. Fury and pity vied to distract him from his flying. He outpaced the Quinjet by accident. He waited shivering on the tarmac for an hour, surrounded by a hastily-assembled caravan that would steal them all away to the Wakandan embassy.

Rogers and Barnes disposed of the Quinjet by setting it on autopilot, parachuting out, and crashing it into a mountain in case of tracking devices. They departed for Wakanda on a scrambled cargo plane, assembled in Orodun and flown by shipping pilots whose loyalty to the king had proven spotless for three generations.

He set up a pain control drip for Barnes, and watched Rogers' bruises fade during the eight hour flight. The two men huddled on their bench, to exhausted to eat or sleep, and a British poem floated through his mind— _leaning together / headpiece filled with straw._

Because of Barnes, T'Challa arrived in Wakanda on a separate flight from his father's casket.

The funeral arrangements for the King and his own coronation left T'Challa precious little time to weep, let alone tend to his pet Americans. He had to trust the doctors and the Dora Milaje to keep them entertained.

He kept vigil on the throne the first night, awake and still, tears trailing through ash and dust on his face; the next night, in the stable, at the stall of his father's favorite mare; later, bent over his father's writing desk, his own back fallen into the same bow T'Chakka slipped into when overburdened with cares, caressing the polished marble with dusty fingers until dawn. A week passed, the King was interred, and at the insistence of Aunt Zolani, he and his court washed the ashes from their bodies after the shortest customary mourning time.

"T'Chakka never suffered extravagant displays when he could help it," she had addressed the court. "Let our mourning serve the will of our beloved Dead, and let our living King lead our nation forward."

Forward to where, was the question T'Challa could not ask.

There were those who held that the recent calamities were the natural consequences of T'Chakka's overtures to greater Africa and to the North. There were those who urged further integration with the Outside, starting with ratifying the Sokovia Accords and ending with application to join the UN. There were those who favored the reinstatement of ukutagumu, a practice out of favor since 4533 that would have lead to the execution or banishment of half the Wakandan families with members studying abroad (5% of the population). A King, at least the kind of king T'Chakka had envisioned T'Challa becoming, a leader in the Western mode, could not simply silence the madmen with a closed fist, tempting though it was.

The facts were these:

Wakanda, as a people and as a civilization, was not ready to ratify anything, with any Outside power, any time in the next ten years.

The youth, a condition T'Challa still suffered, could not return to the blackout conditions of 6120, not in the age of social media, not after every educated man and woman boasted at least one foreign friend, even if only a friend made on the Internet.

Wakanda was still, by every Wakandan metric, the most stable and prosperous nation on the entire African continent, and indeed, the entire planet, but it was a small and land-locked nation. Oceanic trade could occur only by easements through Kenya, and given the threat of piracy would require the development of a merchant marine navy—the first step on the muddy slope down toward imperialism.

Wakanda held, bar none, the richest known deposits of vibranium, a substance that the Outer World had only just begun to appreciate, and would now give anything, do anything, to acquire. With access to vibranium, Outer nations could swiftly close the technological gap with Wakanda—a gap that had shortened drastically over the past forty years.

The Outer World, to its credit, had overtaken Wakanda in certain useful technological fields, notably artificial intelligence and cold fusion.

Assuming an absolutely stable or contracting population, a totally closed Wakanda could subsist, as it had for thousands of years, by the world's most perfect and sustainable system of horticulture. But the youth were not content to subsist. T'Challa was not content to subsist.

In sum, the youth were restive, the old were frightened, the Outer World was too valuable to let alone and too dangerous to trust. T'Challa was too young to rule.

At sixty, he would still be too young to rule.

To distract himself from these cares, he visited his collection of foreigners. The collection had tripled in size after Rogers and his few remaining Outer allies had raided the Raft, a place that had been a brief footnote in the Accords T'Chakka had nearly signed. None of them seemed to belong in such a place.

T'Challa supposed he had learned his first lesson in Kingship: never sign any document that could not be read cover to cover in thirty minutes.

Of all of them, Barnes absorbed most of his interest while being the least interesting. All the man did was eat, browse the Internet, and sit on the balcony of the guest house, staring out into the distance until the sun rose. No sooner had Rogers rescued his other friends, than Barnes vanished from surveillance, yanked Rogers down a ventilation shaft for what must have been an extremely tense private conference, and demanded to be put in medical stasis. Less than forty hours later, it was done. T'Challa had three full-time guests and one less stasis unit in the University Hospital.

The cost of stasis was a minor nuisance. It was said at the University Hospital that Wakandans did not die from cancer, they died from running out of rent money, and at a certain brutal level there was truth to it. Medical stasis had been a staple of Wakandan health care for five hundred years. It was expensive, and risky, but safer than many Western medical practices, and most certainly painless. There were four hundred and twelve stasis units in the Hospital. In past years, there had been a waiting list, but not this year. Being a guest of royalty had its privileges and Barnes was free to use them how he liked.

How he liked, T'Challa thought, was to commit a living suicide.

In his meditation room, a fountain trickled at his back, a candle burned before his eyes, a little moat surrounded the narrow platform where he sat. He examined the follies he had been carrying in the back of his mind these past weeks and discarded them ruthlessly, one by one.

His fancy had been, that Barnes and Rogers would become Wakandans.

There would be a period of sequestration, both legally mandated and emotionally necessary. Barnes could reforge his bond with Rogers, and then T'Challa would show them his country.

He would begin by taking them to a hermitage on Mount Ekyeeru, just below the snowline: cold quick streams, birds singing, the leopard and the ibex the largest beasts to venture so high. The Hermitage could open Barnes' mind with their vapors and tinctures, and wear away the walls and chains that bound him. When Barnes could bear no more, he and Rogers could run for miles. In the high places, under the clearest stars, they could cry to their Christian god and know themselves heard.

Purged of their woe, the three of them could go tracking in the Panther Vast. The pair, enhanced using knowledge stolen by Germans near the turn of the 61st century, could easily keep pace with the Black Panther on foot, and T'Challa could teach them the tracks and sign of Wakanda's creatures the same way his father had shown him, and his father before him, and back and back to before the current dynasty. They would eat wild figs, follow the buffalo and elephants unheard and unseen, trace ants to their anthills, smell the worries of the acacia trees. They would run across the veldt, exulting in the power of their bodies to match their spirits.

They would eat hot bread-apple on sticks from the markets. He would introduce them to omwenge, and watch their faces as the aftertaste hit. They would set aside their drab Western clothes, entranced by Wakandan silks dizzy with patterns older than bronzeworking and fresher than the runways of Paris.

These were enhanced men. They would acquire Wakandan as easily as children. Barnes would set aside Russian, Rogers, perhaps, English. The rich symbolism behind the animal-spirit heroes in Wakanda's epics, they would understand, for they had lived it. They would learn the classics and histories and genealogies, technologies and etiquette, economics and cuisine. They would learn and submit to Wakanda's code of chivalry for spirit people—for Wakanda, unlike the outer world, had a place for men like them. T'Challa would sponsor them for citizenship, and they would pass their exams on the first attempt.

Barnes would be protected, healed, happy, and untouchable. T'Challa would lighten the shadow of his father's murder by the restoration of an innocent man to full life. Rogers would have Barnes; Barnes, Rogers; T'Challa would be patron and friend to them both; they would love his country and his country would love them and there would be respite from mourning.

Instead, Barnes had his oblivion and Rogers his false hope.

T'Challa forced himself to stay away from Barnes' pod for three days until he felt in full control of his resentment. The rage bubbled back just as hotly at the sight of Barnes' placid face under the frosted glass.

"Do you suppose they mean anything?" The attending technician spoke, standing respectfully four feet to his left.

His concentration broke. "To what do you refer?" He suspected he was more terse than the situation called for.

"The code words, to make him . . . did they just, pick words out of a dictionary? Or did they mean something to him?"

He turned on her. "How do you know about his control words?"

She raised an eyebrow, making him feel small. "It's all over Reddit."

"Is it."

"That creep Zemo, he scanned all the pages from the code book and set them up to post automatically to like five different forums and the darknet. It's like the third result if you google Winter Soldier now."

"Show me, please."

She logged in to her personal tablet—a Stark product, and a petty part of T'Challa wanted to enact an embargo on Stark right then and there—and navigated to one of the original forum posts. T'Challa did not speak Russian, but several of the posters replying did, and a number of partial translations of the images had cropped up over the past week since the pages had dropped, as well as arguments over the documents' legitimacy. The content was consistent with what Barnes had described and T'Challa had seen in the Hague.

The pages had been posted two days before Barnes had demanded to be put in stasis, and not a moment too soon if every Wakandan with Internet access, never mind actual terrorists, now had access to Winter Soldier imprinting codes. Zemo's spite, Zemo's genius, continued to ruin Barnes.

T'Challa looked up at Barnes' pod in wordless apology. He returned the tablet to the technician. "You're too young to be on Reddit."

"I'm thirty-two."

"Yes."

"Is that a decree, your Highness?"

"If only."

Curiosity aroused, T'Challa requested and absorbed a translation of the Winter Soldier manual. That night, restless and ashamed, Russian worlds tumbling through his head, he wished he hadn't. He could forgive Barnes his suicide, though he regretted it.

Kingship absorbed all the time and mental energy that mourning once had. T'Challa assigned a crack team of investigational neurologists to Barnes' case, and that was all he could do for Barnes for now.

But though T'Challa was King, he was also the Black Panther, and that brought with it responsibilities, physiologic requirements, and, critically, excuses. A Black Panther _must_ meditate. He need not do it in the meditation room. He borrowed Rogers' balcony, where Barnes had spent so many motionless hours, and sat, clearing his mind, smelling the mountain breezes and listening to the mosquitoes bounce against the barrier, watching the sun set. He stayed through the night—another vigil for the dead, or the practically-dead. He sat on his rump with one leg resting to the side, the other knee up to the chest, a shooter's seat, ready to stand or ready to raise a rifle to brace on his knee, as he had seen Barnes sit.

As the stars rose, deep in the garden below the guest house, he saw something gleam white. The glow grew, multiplied: a dozen tiny moons in the branches of a young dragonfruit tree a hundred cubits off, wafting their soft perfume and gathering moths. T'Challa had not even known the garden had nightblooming plants. He watched the moths dance, the bats swoop above them, the flowers gleam soft in the starshine like the eyes of ghosts, and before he knew it dawn had come and the flowers were closing again. Barnes had not been staring into the void, but gazing on the light. He thought to Barnes, I am sorry I thought ill of you. He thought, I am happy you found this beauty here.

Not suicide, then. Not surrender. Barnes had sought joy, in the days he had been awake to seek it, in the ways he had been ready to taste it. Barnes wanted to live. If T'Challa could free him, Barnes would live, and grow, and love Wakanda; if T'Challa gave him freedom, Barnes would seize it and make good on it.

* * *

T'Challa, with the help of his aunts and uncle and ministers, at last approved a system that would keep Wakanda operating while he fulfilled his duties as Black Panther, student, and man. Regents were involved. There were delegations, memoranda, briefings, open-ended directives. Wakanda's ministers would pull their weight. T'Challa had his mornings back and two free days per week.

He caught up on the neurologists' progress reports. They were stymied to a great extent by Barnes' extensive metal implants—he could never go within five feet of an operating MRI machine.

Deep hypnosis, perhaps with help from compounds from the Hermitage pharmacopoeia, would have been T'Challa's first proposal, but Barnes had effectively proscribed anything like that. A PET scan did not require a magnet, but did require Barnes to be conscious. Radiographs had already been taken, and revealed intracranial wire implants, but they could only speculate what the implants were for or where they connected.

By this time, all the doctors and technicians involved in Barnes' care knew at least some of Barnes' operating codes, out of morbid curiosity if nothing else, and T'Challa was a little glad that only he and Rogers had the codes to open Barnes' stasis pod. If T'Challa had been in Barnes' situation, he would have disappeared, too.

Among the dead-ends, here and there were daring rabbit trails: for example, exploit the phasical property of vibranium to pass a sensor array through the brain without disrupting the neurons. It might, theoretically, allow the team to gain information from Barnes while in stasis—to image the brain regions activated by the trigger words. The papers were all alarmingly speculative.

How to proceed. He twirled a highlighter in his fingers. The progenitor of the sensor-array project, Dr. Mhlobo, sat across the room, pulling and filing archival material, some of it digitized in the 5000's and consequentially staticky. His assistant, fresh from MIT, was trying to debug a converter meant to turn PDFs into BARA.

Oxford, his final year, was fresh in his mind—an agony of goodbyes, of thesis writing, of questions and thesis proposals he could never speak aloud for fear of betraying state secrets regarding Wakanda's vibranium, which at the time did not officially exist.

"This phase sensor array, was it inspired by _Wormhole Extreme?_ " T'Challa asked, stifling a yawn. Mhlobo's eyes widened and he hunched. T'Challa felt a stab of regret. "One finds surprisingly plausible physics in _Wormhole Extreme,_ " he amended, and the tech chorused something similar. Mhlobo relaxed. "The . . . triplicators?"

"The interrogation sequence in five-thirteen," Mhlobo replied. "When the Synthetic Adam passes his hand through the Colonel's head to download his consciousness—yes, very poignant. A great character moment for the Colonel, the damning act for the Adam. And it is absolutely possible, eighty-six out of one hundred and seven canaries survived our procedure. Unfortunately, the dataset is too massive. The brain activity of a human—most humans—would be many times more difficult to parse than that of a canary. I add, our research into phasically implanted vibranium meshes began eleven years before that episode aired."

Of course it had. Just as Wakanda had lost-wax casting two thousand years before the Greeks, the internal combustion engine five hundred years before the Americans, networked computing fifty years before DARPANET. But lately, the Outer World had been catching up. The Outer World had been the first to create synthetic men.

 _Come to Wakanda,_ T'Challa wrote to the Avengers Headquarters, _as an envoy of peace and collaboration. Our soil birthed your bone and sinew; your feet are welcome upon it. Naturally, to prevent the interference of biased parties your presence must be the strictest secret—_ He chuffed to himself and deleted and scrubbed the draft. Perhaps later. Perhaps not.

His free days passed and court, granted, court with training-wraps, began again. His aunt and his uncles on his mother's and stepmother's side sat above and behind him, their seats arranged on a step behind him so that T'Challa could watch their hand signals by a concealed mirror. His half-sister Shuri sat below him, serving today as court scribe. They heard grievances for three hours, Shuri and T'Challa both typing furiously the whole while.

Art had its usual complaints that Hard Science was poaching its musicians for the mathematics department. Animal Husbandry presented a cock and a hen from new breed of chicken for recognition—two silvery smooth creatures weighing not a talent apiece, with identical black combs and red eyes. Outer Surveillance presented its prospectus on the implications of the Berlin fiasco for the safety of Wakanda's youth still Wandering, along with uncalled-for recommendations on adjustments to import duties and border crossing. Central Power bemoaned the voracious demands of Transportation's trolleys, and Transportation sniped at Central Power for unexpected slowdowns and delays. Textile presented a swatch of an odor-and-insect-repellant tear-resistant viscose fabric for adoption by the Militia and the Gymnasium.

At last, the King of Wakanda and his remaining family adjourned to the back room, where Uncle Jongi had a pitcher of beer waiting for them and was just setting a pan of hard corn under the heat ray. T'Challa watched the corn pop in numbed silence. When all that was worth the trouble had popped, Uncle Jongi served it out, passing T'Challa's portion first. T'Challa, after an awkward start, said the blessing over the salt cellar, sprinkled his salt and paprika, and passed the condiments to his right. Aunt Zolani poured the beer. When everyone had been served, T'Challa sat, and his family sat down after him around the round low table.

Shuri paged through her minutes and cleared her throat. "Let's start with the easy ones. Animal Husbandry."

Uncle Mtutuzelt, promptly: "We have two hundred and twelve breeds of chicken on the books; we don't need a new fancy chicken. Let this Ndube fellow market them and see if it catches on."

T'Challa glanced at his aunt. She shrugged, and he nodded. "Defer recognizing the breed, five? Ten. Years."

"That's twenty generations of chickens, any defects in the breed should out."

"Next," said Shuri. "Power. The time has come to double Central Power's capacity, I'd say. The trolleys have to run."

T'Challa knew the answer to this one. "Assemble a working group out of Economics. Authorize them to request two proposals each from Technology, Science, and Hard Science, then bring the best three proposals to Paoni, competing as public works."

They jawed away. T'Challa had sat at his father's elbow for so many of these backroom conferences, in the same seat Shuri now held, and it was a comfort that it was impossible to chew popcorn in a kingly manner. His father had always been, in these times, a very earnest, concerned man struggling to tease out which problems Wakanda faced could be solved by a king. So many could not. And so T'Challa found himself saying, as his father had said, defer, defer, defer.

"Intelligence, I think, needs some heads replaced," Shuri remarked, curling her lip at her tablet.

"Defer. But noted."

Uncle Jongi hummed. "Now is not the time to be sending our youth over the wall for the sake of prestige. And revenues have faltered since we halted vibranium exports. Perhaps his idea about Homecoming duties—"

"That is absurd," T'Challa interrupted. "Increasing Homecoming tax has never, in our history, increased revenue. Especially not now, with the rise in living standards in the Outer World—we would see a brain drain! Absolutely not. I reject it."

Uncle Jongi pouted at him, and Aunt Zol winked. T'Challa sighed as he realized he had been played.

"But really," Aunt Zol cut in, sobering. "The Outer World—the North—is closer to us than it has ever been. Your father signed their treaty. The UN is listening with all their ears to hear whether you, the son of a king of an ancient monarchy, will honor it. And whether you can be induced to sign more treaties. That will be the key. The Accords never would have affected us one way or another; we know how to deal with spirit people. But for good or ill, T'Chakka called down the spotlight on us."

"A treaty," T'Challa repeated.

"I read it," said Zol. "It is a treaty. Wakanda signed her first treaty the day my brother died. My brother was dear to me, and he made many wise decisions, facilitated many advances, but this part of his legacy, T'Challa, if you uphold it it will be on your own shoulders."

In Berlin, T'Chakka had affirmed a treaty with all the European powers. T'Challa's beer churned in his stomach.

"Defer," he said.

Shuri paged down again. "A proposal to adopt the Georgian calendar."

Uncle Jongi quirked his lips. "Now this, we could do."

" _Why?"_ T'Challa demanded, exasperated. "No. Reject. Has Economics even _looked_ at a Georgian calendar? Half the months are named after murdered Romans. It would put Leap Day on 21 Meshir. Can you imagine Leap Day in Meshir? If the Outer World wants to deal with Wakanda, they will deal with _Wakanda_. No."

"Noted," said Shuri. "Now I motion a proposal of my own, and I have the hundred signatures: authorize the deposit of Wakandan dollars in electronic banking. Specifically, MPesa."

"Why? Why MPesa?"

"Because it's cash through your cell phone. Who wouldn't want it?"

Mtutuzelt scoffed. "Play money? Who's to stop some Western company from inflating it into the dirt? Why not ditch the gold standard for coin, it'd be stabler."

"Technology has a universal quantum computer mining coin faster than any other device in the world," Shuri remarked, "so that might not be a bad idea for us. But I am talking about travel. Integration. Trade with our neighbors. When I was in Nigeria, I want a motorcycle, I want a video, I hire a plane, I pull out my cell phone, open the MPesa app with all my Nigerian dollars, and pay in two seconds. But if I were to sell, say, solar refrigerators, or orpicillin, to a dealer in Nigeria, I have to take their dollars, physically cash them out—last year I put that off for six months—before exchanging them for Wakandan at the wall. Our economy is . . . is a closed loop. E cash is the future. At least get Economics to take a serious look at it."

"Let me guess, heads need replacing there, too?" Jongi asked.

"Pruning brings healthy growth," Shuri muttered darkly, an old saying.

"Any economists on your list?" T'Challa asked. "They can run it in Paoni." Shuri glared at him. "And it would be . . . reasonable . . . to recognize MPesa for Homecoming, on a trial basis. I authorize three economists and three information technologists to devise and test a system for receiving payments. Warn Finance, but not until they actually have it running."

"Noted. About the drone issue?"

"Restrict flight paths of private drones," Jongi suggested.

"Put brush-guards on the trolleys to scrape snagged drones off the cables," said Mtutuzelt quickly.

"Yes, guards on the trolleys. Get two from Applied Technology and five from Transportation to determine the extent of the problem and model some solutions; they should be economical and rugged, aesthetics is no concern. If there is too much difficulty we can restrict drone flights as a last resort." He sighed and swirled the dregs of his beer. "When did we build a universal quantum computer? What are we using it for?"

"I was Outside," Shuri said, glancing around the room. None of the others had an answer, either. "Last year, I heard, Hard Science was talking about a break-through. I got back and it was running, likely had been for a few months. So far, they're mostly doing protein-folding and drug discovery, aside from coin."

"Has anyone told Medicine?" T'Challa asked, rubbing his temples. "No. Of course. Someone tell Medicine that Wakanda has quantum computing. Also, I have decided on this year's King's Prize."

"What, already, kitten?" asked Jongi.

"Yes. I am a decisive King."

After court, T'Challa signaled Shuri to join him in the sitting room of the royal chambers for a few games of Mancala, as had been their habit before their father's death. Shuri set out her board and sowed its rows with smooth white counters, and T'Challa took comfort that this, at least, had not changed. He had the first move.

His mancala game was outstanding, but Shuri's was uncanny. He stared down at the board, paralyzed: he could see two dozen moves ahead, the entire board was his for the choosing, and yet, disaster loomed. The hair rose on the back of his neck. He steeled himself and picked up the first cup.

Across the board, Shuri grinned with all her teeth, like a hyena. Resigned to his doom, he dropped his counters around the board, one by one.

* * *

 _The King speaks:_

 _The King's prize for the trials of Paoni 6157 is announced. Parameters to follow._

 _Attention: Medicine, Hard Science, Technology, Spiritual Affairs—_

 _Special attention: Speculative Computing, Computer Programming, Neuroanatomy, Neurophysiology, Psychology, Parapsychology—_

 _A protocol to generate a dynamic computer simulation of a functioning brain is required. The simulation shall be of such precision that it emulates the cognitive and physiological effects of the five emotions and is capable of perceiving and interpreting sound stimuli, and of such complexity as to preserve memory recall. For datasets, contact Dr. Mhlobo of Experimental Medicine. For hardware and processing time, contact Codemaster Ankedo. If successful, Wakanda will have greater power to characterize and understand mental illnesses, to acquire intelligence from Outsiders, and to keep our Ancestors with us in mind as well as in ceremony. Advances in computer hardware by Hard Science have made this request possible. Prize privileges may be shared among up to four members of the winning team._

 _Let Ingenuity defeat Complacence._

 _The King has spoken._

* * *

The months of Deluge passed in a harried prelude to Paoni. T'Challa programmed his first AI using a basic text from Computing, a simple sprite that watched the hospital cameras and made his ring buzz whenever Steve Rogers approached Barnes' cryo suite. When it went off, T'Challa would pack away his models, notepad, and hologram stick and depart by the other door. He had taken to leaving off cologne to prevent Rogers from smelling him.

T'Challa was an unofficial assistant to another team preparing for Paoni: Dr. Mhlobo's re-invigorated vibranium-mesh synapse scanning project. T'Challa liaised with Manufacturing, determining the tolerances necessary for the microscopic wires and their positioning, being himself well-versed in the subatomic, nanoscale, and macroscale physical and electrical properties of vibranium. His part was to ensure that Mhlobo's team had a selection of viable devices to test. The meshes had to be narrow and uniform enough to resolve individual neuronal synapses, thick enough to maintain their properties as transistors, sturdy enough for reasonable handling, and capable of maintaining a phasic state for at least one hundred seconds continuously, while in motion. Manufacturing had had to revive techniques for drawing wires that had seen no use since the samite heyday of the 5300's.

When dealing with Quality Control became too much to bear, or when Mhlobo was satisfied with his current ten mesh halo prototypes for scanning anaesthetized canaries or sheep, or when he felt haunted by wrathful urges to bludgeon his subjects (or to demand a jet, slip north to the Hague, and disembowel his father's killer), he liked to sit at a visitors' table in the cryo suite, eavesdropping on interdepartmental messages from the King's Prize teams and drawing up sensor arrays for a replacement arm for Barnes.

T'Challa did not know a single other person with a permanent metallic implant. They came and went in waves in Wakanda: for a hundred years, Medicine would swear a particular device was safe, and then Statistics would follow with a litany of never-imagined hazards. He knew the Outer World was entering its first dalliance with them. More misfortune theirs.

As barbaric as it was to permanently graft a sixty pound mechanical device to a man's body, it was of course worse to leave him with a thirty pound metallic shoulder and no arm attached to it.

He acknowledged that he may be sublimating some of his grief and guilt into his obsession with helping Barnes.

He realized that his avoidance of Rogers had become ridiculous long ago when his alarm went off just as a troop of nurses and cryo technicians, a frail young woman, and five of her weeping family were entering by the door he had intended to sneak out by. T'Challa packed up his work and stood, respectful of their solemn goodbyes, and kept out of their way. The woman's father kissed her forehead, her mother kissed her hands, her lover her throat. The glass case shut her in, the pod activated. They wept as though for the dead. It had been too soon for T'Challa. Tears filled his eyes as well.

So it was when Rogers found him, a hunched, frustrated, buffalo of a man. He tilted his head toward the young woman's pod as the last of her family left the suite. "Friend of yours?"

"It is most affecting," T'Challa evaded.

Rogers nodded and sighed, accepting the implied half-truth. "I'm sorry, your Majesty, but I have to ask."

"My people are exploring several promising avenues to help Sergeant Barnes," T'Challa assured him. "It is a great challenge, which Wakanda greets with great enthusiasm."

Rogers sighed again, apparently not as comforted by this as he should be.

"I have been a poor host," T'Challa said. "In two days time, after closing at 1600 hours, you and your associates are invited to join me at the Defense Museum. When you learn our history, you may have more faith in my country."

"What museum closes at four in the—twenty-hour day, right," Steve muttered to himself. "I mean, yes, thanks, your Majesty. I'll pass it on."

At the Defense Museum, just as the last of the evening crowd of cross-training Applied Technology guildmembers, Artists, and what appeared to be a new Anachronistic Technology cult filed out the double doors, T'Challa met the refugees Steve Rogers, Sam Wilson, and Wanda Maximoff. Okoye accompanied him, dressed, as was her preference when not undercover, in Textiles' latest armor-mesh and a pair of hand-built jungle boots.

"Here they are," she murmured in Wakandan, "Captain Awkward, Awkward Questions, and the Mouse who Roars."

"Your Majesty," said Rogers Americanly. The other two echoed him, and Maximoff curtseyed, then Wilson and Rogers both inclined their heads, glanced up at Okoye, and bowed, deeper, by stages and out of synchrony with each-other. Okoye, as though to demonstrate, bent at the waist until her forehead touched her shins. T'Challa watched the blood drain from his guests' faces, before he held up a hand. "That particular courtesy went out of fashion in 54—I mean, 750 CE. A twenty-degree bow is conventional."

They bowed again, slighter, and with slightly fewer false starts.

"Let us go in," T'Challa said. They crossed the broad threshold of the ancient building, Wakanda's second palace, which had been abandoned in the 1400's due to inefficiencies in plumbing and airflow, and restored and retrofitted in the 2200's as a learning center and occasional forum.

"Whoa," Wilson exclaimed, staring at the wall as they entered the antechamber. T'Challa and Okoye glanced at each-other in confusion, then tried to see the space through foreigners' eyes.

Facing the entrance was a broad wall of mortared stone, broken by faux colonades in Egyptian style and at the center, a fifteen-by-ten cubit mosaic of Bast. The diode lamps made the hundred thousand obsidian chips that made up her body glimmer like a lake in moonlight: a great shining cat, and when one looked closer at her pelt, one found more cats, smaller cats, cats interlocking and cats within cats, an organic spiral that progressed toward the heart of the goddess, where a tiny sculpted cat stared out with golden eyes. T'Challa had passed it a hundred times. It was typical of the art of the period, some would say trite.

Apparently, it was stunning.

He allowed his visitors time to contemplate, before guiding them through the hall to the chamber devoted to 5500's war arts. "Wakanda was not always a cloistered nation. Nor did it always hold its present borders; in fact, until 5500 we held the entire Nalough river, from its head in lake LAKE to its delta on the Indian Ocean. The Nalough connected us to the world. We are the oldest continuous urban society on earth, and like most urban societies, we developed armies of skilled craftsmen producing goods for export. The montane regions, within our modern borders, are rich in iron ores, copper, salt, and lakes. We have good volcanic soils. The Nalough is navigable along most of its course. Biting insects do poorly here. This land is . . . is blessed. It is perfect. It is an outstanding place for humans to live, and when the first inhabitants of Wakanda arrived here, they recognized this and they have held their ground to the present day—helped, of course, by the mountain ranges that protect us on three sides. Our first line of defense."

The 5500's room was filled with painted shields, some replicas and some, sealed in glass cases to protect them from moisture, originals carried down from high-mountain memorials. "Here was our second line of defense. Bamboo struts made our shields lighter and stronger than those of our neighbors. Our armies could move more quickly and endure more punishment. The shield face is typically five layers of heavy silk, laminated with cured latex. On the opposite wall, you see historical blade designs. By this century, we had almost ceased producing iron for domestic use—we exported iron ingots, but fired the iron into steel for our war implements. The laminate recurve bow was our longest-reaching weapon at this time, used mainly for hunting and competition shooting; it was too difficult to learn and manufacture to be an infantry weapon. A spring-steel crossbow was designed and proved an excellent compromise.

"In these years, Wakandans had little occasion for war. We fought only to secure our trade routes, and occasionally to repel or avenge a raid. We had good relations with our neighbors Lunda and Buganda, and our youth made constant traffic to the great learning centers of Somalia, Timbuktu, and the Indian subcontinent."

Wilson pointed at the great iron bell that hung in pride of place at the center of the room. "What's that here for?"

T'Challa smiled. It was not a special bell, simply a hold-over of the period, of the typical type and appropriate date of casting: two tons, its surface thickly laquered to stave off corrosion, ornamented with sine waves and drum signatures in relief. If the bell-ringer walked around the bell, dragging a striker over the drum signature, the bell would sing out the motto of Orodun, the city where it was cast. "That is the precursor to Wakanda's artillery industry. It was Art, and Art will never let Technology forget this, that first drove Wakanda to construct the great iron foundries that would later allow us to manufacture our own cannon. Extravagance presages revolution. Come with me."

They arrived at the next room, filled with rows of variably-sized cannon, some constructed of bamboo but most of iron or steel, as well as more shields, javelins, crossbows. "The Sundering is commonly accepted to begin in 5672, with the collapse of the Luba empire. Around this time, small firearms became the most sought-after trade good on the continent, and their price was slaves. It has been an edict since before known history that Wakandans shall never be sold. I must say we were tempted.

"Instead we purchased a few muskets with our usual commodities: gold, silk, salt. But after internal testing, we found that by interweaving silk threads with vibranium wires, our laminate shields could be made to repel bullets as close as three feet from the muzzle of a typical small-arm. We rapidly adopted this technique by stepping up vibranium refining. Tactics at this time relied on penetrating charges by shield-bearers, and when possible, area-denial and anti-personnel projectiles fired at a distance. Here," he pointed to a flat case on the wall containing pressed plants with their names and ratios for combination, "is the formula for a fumigation projectile. Here," he pointed to a large bronze dial sitting on a desk, surrounded by a day's litter of pens and scratch paper, "is a calculator developed in the 5690's for estimating firing angles. Our enemies learned not to cross our mountains. As our allies fell into disorder, or turned to raiding for the sake of purchasing their own firearms, overland trade vanished and the river became too dangerous to hold. We gave up the river, and the sea. Isolation, as a policy, began in its strict, modern form."

The next room was draped in long fabric banners, the edges threadbare and grubby from childrens' hands. Images, no, poster-sized color photographs, hung on the walls. There were more cannon, more projectiles, a row of blocky rectangular long-arms, and at the center of the room, surrounded by binocular microscopes, a tiny square of glass illuminated from below. "Around 5900, European powers began to invade the African subcontinent physically, as well as economically. To the East, we fended off the Belgians. To the West, the British. We also saw improvements in the range and rate of fire of the guns used by the invaders. These developments alarmed the royal house.

"Wakanda centralized economically and politically, a move that has only begun to reverse in the last twenty years. All our domestic surplus was directed toward military munitions and research. Using the tactic of penetrating shield-charges, we captured rifles, cartridges, and four British Maxim Guns. They proved to surpass our crossbows in range and accuracy by a fair margin, and the Maxim Gun, of course, far outstripped our rate of fire. A domestic solution was required."

He gestured to the central display of binocular microscopes. "The first solution was discovered by the archivist Solly Oxhumbe during a heroic records review. This tile describes a publicity stunt performed by the Textile Guild in 2051 at the height of the first silk boom. Thankfully, the dimensions of the air envelope and the general design of the burner were preserved. The principle was sound. In 5913 when the first combat balloons were constructed, we had artificial silks whose production could be increased much more rapidly. A fusiform shape was used to reduce wind resistance."

"Wait, wait," one of his guests interrupted—Sam Wilson, looking up from one of the microscopes. "So if I'm hearing this right. This piece of glass is a microfiche from the age of the Pyramids that describes the world's first hot air balloon, which you people reconstructed as nylon blimps that you flew against the English Army in 18-whatever?"

"Yes. Their pilots directed artillery strikes. This series of still-frames is most dramatic, you see in this sequence the arrival of the first fumigation charge, the shrapnel shells, the retreat, the dead and wounded alone on this last image. This system took rifles and the Maxim gun entirely out of play, and the psychological effect, I read, was significant. But we were not content with long-distance bombardment as a way to counter European small-arms. It was proposed that we produce our own versions of the Maxim gun and the rifle; we had the manufacturing precision, and we had guano for salt-petre, but the loss of our continental trade partners made acquiring sulfur much more difficult, and Technology, seeing the improvements that Europe had made in its small-arms over the last few centuries, was not content with incremental superiority.

"The King's Prize winners of 5918, 5919, and 5921 provided the firing principle, the projectile, and the first working model of our fragmentation gun. The technology had long been used in our trolleys' propulsion systems. A fuel cell and a recently-developed capacitor powered a row of five harmonically-spaced magnetic actuators, accelerating and heating a fused iron-and-ceramic projectile. Muzzle velocities of . . . approximately two thousand feet per second were achieved. The projectiles are aerodynamically stable. When cooled abruptly, for example, upon entry into a human body, they explode. I believe your culture would call these weapons 'rail guns.'"

Rogers and Maximoff raised their eyebrows in confusion. Wilson mouthed curse words silently to himself.

"So you see the way Wakanda responds to challenge," T'Challa concluded. "When our enemies' bows shot two hundred feet, ours shot five hundred. When our enemies' rifles shot fifteen hundred feet, ours shot five thousand. Many of our greatest achievements had no necessity at all—our great foundry. Our first balloon. Wakanda arises from seven thousand years of uninterrupted scientific inquiry and our power grows with each generation. Captain Rogers—it is now Wakanda's will to help your friend."

Wilson and Maximoff stared at Rogers, and he hunched, flushed.

"The later exhibits contain current military knowledge and are closed to Outsiders," Okoye announced.

They led the stunned Outsiders back to the vestibule of the museum. Rogers was staring at his folded hands, obviously troubled.

"Do any of you have any questions?" T'Challa asked as they prepared to part ways.

"Yes, sir—your Majesty." It was Wilson. "When did you come up with electromagnetic sky trolleys?"

"3734."

"You guys ever have an age of steam? Or did you just blow right past it?"

"Steam was the first mechanical propulsion for our trolleys. We used it on and off for two hundred years; it caused unacceptable deforestation."

"How'd you pick Year One?"

T'Challa blinked. "That was just when the Weathermen started counting."

"Last question. Why is there a Thumbs-Up Jesus action figure on Steve's night stand?"

Rogers blinked. "That's weird? I thought that was weird. Didn't want to ask."

T'Challa and Okoye looked at each-other, subtly wincing. _Shuri_ , T'Challa thought. "In Wakanda, we take religion seriously, but not too seriously. I believe one of the household was testing you." He nodded to his guests, signaled Okoye with one eyebrow, and departed at all regal speed.

* * *

Shuri regretted the years she had envied her half-brother.

Yes, T'Challa had been fussed over more than most: the middle child, the Queen Mother's second and T'Chakka's first, the crown prince, if he could survive the challengers. Yes, T'Challa, and not Shuri, _actually remembered_ being read to by Shuri's mother Ramonda before she disappeared. Yes, T'Challa's interests got him doctorates from universities, not Outsider money she didn't need and veiled accusations of disloyalty.

Now Shuri was crown prince. She had so many duties, she had to use her duties as an excuse to get out of her duties.

One of her duties (the excuse, not the duty she was avoiding) was to escort guests of the King through the streets of Wakanda, Wakanda—the greatest city on Earth, now gearing up for the greatest festival on Earth—and keep them out of trouble. It was an important job. The Americans might hear about their oil reserves. The Sokovian might blow some more people up.

It was predicted to be a fair, sunny week for Paoni, though the Proving Grounds were built for all weathers—channels under grates in the pavement, a self-healing mesh strung overhead to exclude rain, sun, insects, bird droppings, and satellite imaging. Tent cities were springing up at the edges of the mesh, great modular towers, each bearing the flag of the cult or guild they housed, growing ever larger as yokels from all over Wakanda rejoined their spiritual brethren and lashed inflatable puptents to their tops and sides. Soon the crowd would thicken, but for now, the vendors, performers, and concessions were warming up, and the competitors, once their tents were assembled, were for the most part cloistered in with their teams.

The food stands had been the first to set up. Shuri bought her guests each a steamed eyeball from the first vendor that had them. Wanda poked hers carefully with a finger, licked it, nibbled cautiously at the gelatin layer. Steve ate the entire thing in two bites, not appearing to taste it, and licked the wrapper clean. Sam, with a wary expression, took a good chunk off the side, raised his eyebrows, and then slowed down to savor the rest. "That's pretty good," he remarked. "What's in this?"

"Bean curd, sweet potato, tamarind," Shuri said. "I wouldn't call it a national dish, but I've never seen them anywhere else."

"I like it," Sam said. He turned to the vendor, grinned, and repeated himself, then tried French, then Arabic. The vendor stared at him with a carefully blank expression. Yokel, Shuri decided.

In Wakandan, she said, "Crack a smile, he's supposed to be here."

The vendor smiled cautiously, spread her hands, and said, " _Merc_ _í_ _._ "

"Thank-you for pretty nation," Sam said in French. "Have a joyous day."

"Lucky Paoni," said the vendor, shy but warming. Shuri supposed they had each exhausted their French, and from this point things would only get awkward.

She led them between the little raised plinths that dotted the entire Proving Grounds to watch a dance team ironing out their choreography, decked out in full costume with bells and fiber-optics. Apparently there had been an error when they were assigned their plinth, the dimensions were wrong, and it was throwing off the aerobatics. There was tension and restrained cursing. Every few minutes they would break, and the dancers would cluster around the choreographer as he tried to model adjustments to the throws with a physics engine on his tablet.

A squad of five-year-old girls was hanging sacks of plastic pearls for their first arm-band test, under the supervision of their combat mistress. Two plinths down, eight-year-olds, already finished hanging their sacks of gravel, were doing one-armed push-ups in the shade while chanting a rhyme. All told, they passed ten girls' martial arts classes in ten minutes. "Anybody seen _Enter the Dragon_?" asked Sam, watching twenty older teens hardening their hands in vats of smooth pea gravel. The other guests looked puzzled, both at Sam's reference and at the young women.

"Oh," Shuri said. "Women can't apply to go Wandering without their Buffalo Horn. It takes most people twelve to fifteen years to achieve, so parents start their girls early, that way they get their Horn at eighteen and head right over the wall to some Outside university if that's what they want. The boys' growth plates don't close until their twenties, so most boys don't start training until they turn ten. Besides, boys only need their Badger Tooth to go over the wall, and there's no subsidy for their training. I think about seventy percent of women have Buffalo Horns—there's a few ranks above that, if they want it, but that's mostly for competition or Dora Milaje. I got my Panther Claw the same year T'Challa got his, and he's four years older than me."

"What if a girl can't earn it?" Wanda asked.

"She stays in Wakanda where it's safe," Shuri said, shrugging. "It's hard when they don't like fighting. It's easier for the boys. If a man washes out after four years, he can still go on and see the world, they figure he'll be fine. A woman has to be a warrior first."

A costumed performer wandered by: Donald Duck, the mask wire and paper and the tail a hologram, wearing a beer helmet and a motorcycle jacket, a red mushroom cloud on the jacket back and an M-16 slung over one shoulder, a red plastic cup in one hand and a rubber hamburger in the other. The guests all tracked him as he clowned past. Shuri winced.

Wanda looked at Steve, then bent over, snickering. Of course the Sokovian would like Donald.

"I feel like I'm supposed to be offended," Sam said, watching them.

Steve's mouth was tight. "Is that how other cultures see us?" he asked, distraught.

"Yes," said Shuri bluntly. "But you're nothing special. We've been working on it, but with recent events . . . We didn't _hate_ Outsiders until the last few hundred years. But we saw what happened to the rest of the continent. We weren't invaded, but we were hurt. Generations grew up in fear. Foreign commerce was _gone._ We couldn't buy grain or beef. Population controls had to be tightened. There were decades where nobody went over the wall because they'd be snatched. The whole continent was at war. Even today, mothers tell their children at night to be quiet or Cecil Rhodes will come cut off our hands. Do you have any idea what that's like?"

"Man," said Sam. "My momma just told me not to run in public or keep my hands in my pockets."

Shuri felt a stab of guilt, and hopped up on a plinth to get a better view of the proving grounds. "This way," she said, heading for a row of dry-goods stalls.

Designers competing in Paoni used pre-show sales to gain an edge and to test out ideas before presenting them to a voting audience, as well as eke out a profit in case of a poor showing. She brought them to a booth with the sigil of a guild faction she trusted, a group who specialized in sturdy clothing with a fashionable punch. The face under the canopy was familiar.

"Hey, Trouble!" she called. "The King has guests! Two tall, one skinny. I'm thinking dorky, but not so dorky they pick up on the joke. Also, civilian body armor."

Mavuto Alyek stood, looked the guests up and down, and invited them inside. "If you want a joke, you've come to the wrong guild." To the guests, he said, "Parlez vous Francais? English? Deutsch?"

"English, thank-you," said Wanda.

Mavuto looked good. Married life clearly hadn't dampened him any; his clothes head to toe were the kind of outlandish cool he had joined the guild by, and someone, perhaps his wife—Shuri had not had the chance to meet her—had built up his hair into a sculptured confection that meant he'd be wearing a special helmet to sleep. She wondered if he planned to model or emcee for the show. He seemed to be the only one manning the booth; the others must be off stretching, or thinking charismatic thoughts, or whatever it was fashion people did to prepare.

"How have you enjoyed your time in Wakanda?" Mavuto asked, familiar with the practice of tourism from his travels.

"Lovely." "Great hospitals, very clean." "It's a real eye-opener."

"Good, good. This working group is called the Golden Comb, see this bee motif—one of our designers, Oliver Bacia-Suto, traced her lineage back to a tribe who used this bee on their pottery in the fourth millennium, and her family gave it to the guild. Our aspiration is to fuse couture and utility—fashion and function? All our materials meet basic performance requirements. We expect our buyers will not put their lives on hold to express their personalities. But we don't hold with the function-first school of design, either, because why." He held up a sleeveless shirt. "Why does this shirt have fifty seams? Because they flatter the torso. But it will not chafe, fray, or fall apart in the wash."

"So you're a luxury brand," said Sam.

Mavuto shrugged. "If value is luxury."

Shuri and Mavuto helped the guests navigate the racks and shelves in the back of the booth, now and then pulling down holoscreens so they could change in privacy. It was an amusing exercise in frustration. Steve's size was not hard to find—Wakandans ran tall—but his threshold for personal embarrassment was unexpectedly high. The collection for sale was supposedly all easy-to-wear pieces, but half the shirts made Steve's head look like a hard-boiled-egg, and colors like malachite, which Shuri had once considered universally flattering, brought out green undertones in Wanda's skin and made her look two days dead. Sam proved picky, though he could not reliably tell women's pants from men's.

After an hour and a half later, the guests each had two acceptable outfits—Wanda sticking with red, Steve gamely sporting a black-and-yellow v-neck tunic, Sam in tasteful browns and ochres almost as austere as T'Challa's suits—and Sam had a snappy red-and-white Vibrex flak jacket, at Shuri's insistence. Shuri made a show of calling up their receipt on her wristband—just over two thousand _W_. "How much American money do you think we've spent today?" she asked her guests.

The blood visibly drained from Steve's face. Shuri watched, fascinated.

"Is there a reason you're telling us besides torturing Steve?" Sam asked.

"It's an interest of mine," Shuri said. "At our current exchange rate, this shopping expedition cost eighteen thousand American dollars."

"I can pay that back," said Steve, breathing deeply. "I have a lot of savings."

"My point is that even if Wakanda did open our borders, there are very few people who could afford to come here," Shuri said. "You don't have to pay that back. I was just torturing you."

They strolled on, the guests carrying their purchases and their Western clothes in mesh bags, watching competitors warm up for athletic events, lay out floral displays, practice oral presentations, sing, weld, assemble. "So what is the deal with Paoni?" Sam asked as the sun began to lower. "Why do we have to get out of town for the main event?"

Shuri walked on a moment, wondering how to phrase it for an American. "Paoni is our harvest festival. But because Wakanda is an urban, technological culture, it's also an intellectual and cultural harvest. It's a county fair, the Oscars, a Vatican council, thesis defense, and a dozen military contract bids all rolled into one," she said at last.

"Don't forget technology expo," Steve remarked.

"Exactly," Shuri approved. "Today is the warm-up. The competitors are still secretive, because the last thing they want is for another team to badmouth their idea or sabotage their device. But tomorrow, we'll start presenting technologies for review that no one has ever seen before. State secrets. And you know Tony Stark personally."

Wanda hissed and glowed red. Fascinating.

"You'll love the hot springs. Lots of history. The Dora Milaje will take great care of you up there."

* * *

Paoni was very different from the throne.

T'Challa envied Shuri. She was free to wander the exhibits—likely not for insights that could be turned to solve ongoing engineering problems, as T'Challa liked to do, but instead to snatch up viable but second-rate projects to market to foreign investors. Licensing Wakanda's second-best viscose power loom design to a textile cooperative in Burma. An anti-dementia drug with a projected 2% chance of inducing psychosis to a pharmaceutical company in Britain. He couldn't decide if she was simply putting the sweet rain to use, or practicing a novel form of intellectual imperialism with Wakanda as the beneficiary.

From the throne, T'Challa watched the final elimination rounds of all the guilds and disciplines—singing, cooking, historiography, weightlifting, quarterstaff-fighting, aeronautics, city planning, on and on—in order, one at a time. He was not a voting member of the audience—not until the King's Prize—but he knew, at some level, that most of the competitors were performing for him. He did his best to appreciate them. Musical composition, for example—for some reason, balladry shared a path with polyrhythmic mechanocore, and T'Challa had to sit through ten minutes of a (sublimely sung by G'Bacin Sondota) sensationalized aria recounting the trial and banishment of a Bolshevik spy in 6128, while his favorite instrumentalists were already packing up to disperse to nearby clubs after their dismissal. He should have asked an aide to record some of the performances he was missing.

Defense always took up at least two of Paoni's six days. There were some interesting concepts—an algorithm for interpreting infrared imagery to allow facial recognition through cloud cover; an electromagnetic field that, if built, would render Wakanda's entire seventy-five thousand square kilometers invisible from the air; a ground-penetrating intercontinental missile system that could remotely destroy nuclear stockpiles; improvements to the range and power of the laser canon that hovered protectively overhead in geosynchronous orbit; a proposal to use the sky mirror to reflect MASER pulses from Central Power back down to earth at ground-based targets. T'Challa would not oppose launching one or two more orbital cannons. It would take the existing laser cannon at least fifteen minutes and most of its power supply to destroy a single helicarrier.

The engineering conglomerate's many exhibits filled him with melancholy: he wanted to be on that podium, he wanted to be developing those devices, he wanted to be Prince T'Challa, hovering behind the presenter so as to deflect accusations of favoritism, watching his father smile at their progress.

Codemaster Ankara presented the quantum computer with his usual smugness.

The King's Prize exhibitions presented on the last day. T'Challa stepped down from the throne to join the other voting experts, assembled from the fields of neurophysiology, cognitive neuroanatomy, parapsychology, computer programming. Codemaster Ankedo and Dr. Mhlobo, of course. Six teams had turned out: groups of four to ten, mostly cross-disciplinary groups, ages ranging from twelve to ninety, mixed sexes, some in Wakandan tunics or cult regalia, some in headscarves or Western suits. Team by team, they loaded their programs on the quantum computer, projected their visual aids on the great holoscreen of the Centripetal Plinth and described and demonstrated their brain simulations, which interpreted data that Dr. Mhlobo's team had collected using vibranium mesh brain scanning with T'Challa's funding and technical assistance.

Two projects were obvious duds. Too little experience, too few; too much, too many. No coherent analysis of the synaptic web of a canary or donkey. The remaining four—one showed a disquieting preoccupation with the projection of the brain, the labels of the different views, the elegance of the user interface, when T'Challa had not asked for a good interface. He was an engineer; he knew what was bone and what was hide. Two of the teams contained acquaintances whose work he simply could not trust, but perhaps their team-mates had compensated for them.

There were at least four ways to model the mind of a donkey. T'Challa took notes and shared his conclusions on the math that underpinned the models, while the psychologists covered depth and the donkey's trainer covered verisimilitude. After the presenters were finished, the voting experts played with their simulations for hours, late into the night. T'Challa gave his nod to three of them, respecting the models' stability. The psychologists approved a different group of three. Of the two common between them, the parapsychologist approved both and the donkey's trainer approved one. T'Challa could not have asked for a clearer showing. He clapped his hands twice.

"The King speaks!" chanted the Guard in unison.

T'Challa ascended the throne and raised the royal staff over the anxious exhibitors—each thrumming, some trembling, one nauseated with desperation for his personal approval. He wondered how kings of the past had ever gotten used to this. "The King's Prize of Paoni 6157 is awarded: Tau Chepkirwok, Nailah Mugagga, Shaka Aver, Thoko Suto, and Kenyangi Sondota, for their algorithm simulating the activity of a living brain. To four of these innovators, the privilege to wander Outside with the assurance of return, for two generations, and the release of obligation to tithe, for seven years, is granted."

The winning team cheered. They appeared to have already decided who would waive prize privileges: likely Shaka Aver, as she was Thoko Suto's grandmother.

"The remaining exhibitors' work will be archived. Mention of these accomplishments to Outsiders is forbidden," T'Challa concluded. He lowered the staff.

"The King has spoken!" chanted the Guard.

The exhibitors and voters dispersed, mingled, collected their equipment, wandered off to clubs or beds. T'Challa departed, trailed by four of Okoye's picked women. The proving grounds of Paoni were lit at night by the mesh screen above; he walked until at last he passed out into the pleasure garden where the stars winked overhead.

His peace was shortlived.

Shuri dropped down from a trolley cable, startling him into a twenty-foot leap away. Aunt Zolani and Uncle Jongi strolled out of the dark over the grass.

The Dora Milaje looked down at him, amused, then waited for orders. He motioned for them to leave.

"Good evening, Aunt, Uncle. Sister." He righted a small hydroponic row he had overturned, and stood.

"You could say good morning, my sister's son," said Aunt Zol.

T'Challa had studied war long enough to recognize an ambush. "What troubles you?"

Shuri spoke. "That creepy, _Ghost in the Shell_ bullshit is not bringing Babba back."

He shut his eyes and pressed his thumb hard between his eyebrows. "No. It requires a scan of an intact brain."

"Whose brain? The assassin's?"

"It will find diverse medical and intelligence applications."

"You know that's _fucking_ terrifying."

"We have a _Death Star._ We've a long history of being _fucking_ terrifying."

"The King's Prize is supposed to help protect all Wakanda. To raise us all up. To make us better than we've been, lead us forward!" Shuri ranted.

"T'Challa," said Jongi soberly, "Not everything can be fixed. Warm the man up and send him on his way."

T'Challa chuffed. " _Rusted,_ " he enunciated. " _Freight-car._ "

Jongi grimaced. "You have a point."

"He'd be back at his trade inside two days. Even Within, someone would use him."

"And the cannibals have Internet, too," Jongi agreed.

Shuri hissed. "Bast's tits, Uncle, it's the sixty-first century, you can't just call Outsiders cannibals!"

"This is the rhinoceroses all over again, isn't it," said Zol quietly.

Shuri blinked at him in confusion, as T'Challa felt a chill on his skin.

Shuri would not remember. Shuri's mother Ramonda had been like a mother to T'Challa, before she'd disappeared over the wall and was never heard from again. T'Challa had lost half his world. He hated to cry, so instead he worked until he was too tired to cry. He ran, he fought, he practiced his penmanship, he read folktales and engineering texts over and over. He found good work in the wild animal sanctuary at Bast's temple, where he spent every afternoon for four years.

Wild animals had no nation. They acknowledged no Outside or Within. They belonged to Bast, not to Wakanda. Even in the darkest days of Wakanda's shuttering, devotees of Bast had healed the animals that crossed the Wall. As a young boy, T'Challa had raked paddocks, thawed rodents under the heat wave, chopped fruits and vegetables, the same as any other supplicant working in Bast's honor. As he got older, he was trusted with more: binding and cleaning eagles' wings while the older devotees restrained the frightened birds, mixing formula and nursing orphan antelope. Wounded animals were brought to the temple in all seasons. Every creature returned to liberty was honored with a tea ceremony.

When he was thirteen, a pregnant black rhinoceros, hornless and with one leg half-destroyed by maggots, was flown in from Outside. The leg barely held her. She was wild, of course, and had to be sedated half of each day for poultices, skin grafts, a sling to support her weight. The leg, in the end, could not be salvaged. She died two weeks in, of despair and an undetected gastric ulcer.

The devotees cut the calf out of her within minutes of her passing. She had been receiving hormone injections to accelerate the calf's maturation, and it was closer to development than it could have been—undersized, of course—but not ready. They put the calf on a ventilator, incubated her in a hyperbaric chamber. Her skin grew red where she rested on its yielding gel mat. Her eyes were small, pink, confused. T'Challa watched the devotees monitor her vitals, took notes, fetched and carried as they pumped her veins full of serum from her mother, nutrients, hormones. She gained enough strength to leave the incubator, and T'Challa was allowed to help her walk on her soft cartilaginous toes, help her nurse the special hydrolysed formula devised for her undeveloped stomach. For two exhausting weeks, T'Challa and the devotees believed she would live. They named her Nia.

Nia stopped gaining after the second week. Her gut was not maturing. She grew shriveled, weak. The devotees put her back on intravenous nutrition. She developed pneumonia, joint infections, sepsis. T'Challa cried for days because he had not been with her when she died. He cried the way he could not cry for Ramonda or his mother. It was for the calf, not himself, that he grieved.

The devotees, gently, turned him away from the animal sanctuary for a year. They told him he needed to see to his own hurts. To take comfort from Bast in another wing of the temple.

"I can help this man," he told Zolani, now. "I've already mourned my father."

She frowned, and T'Challa always felt like a fool, so small, when something he said worried her like this. "That was your public mourning, cub. That was obligatory, it had to be finished as quickly as possible. But now the people are settled. The regents know their roles. Paoni has come and gone. Promise me, T'Challa, that you will see to yourself. Go to the Hermitage, go to the highlands, go to T'Chakka's stable, whatever brings you comfort. Don't try to bury your grief in another man's pain."

T'Challa pressed his thumb harder into his forehead. "I will," he choked.

"Promise me, cub."

"I promise, Aunt."

She kissed his forehead, and beckoned Shuri and Jongi away after her. T'Challa stood in the garden for a long time, watching the stars.

* * *

T'Challa had finished planning his promised trip to the Highlands to sit under the stars and feel sorry for himself. He waited to make his goodbye to his three guests as they returned from their own seclusion at the Hot Springs.

The Outsiders and their escorts trooped into the sitting room, freshly showered and tense. Okoye in particular seemed in a foul mood. He had expected some resentment—they'd missed Paoni for a dull assignment to lead unproven Outsiders on a back-country patrol of an area of no great strategic value—but Okoye's teeth were tight enough to snap swords. Her squadmates' faces were carefully blank. Rogers looked exhausted, Maximoff's eyes were fixed to the floor, and Wilson shielded his expression behind mirrored aviator sunglasses.

"How was your trip?" he asked in English.

Okoye glared at the Outsiders and they were silent. "There were no injuries," she said.

"Minor cultural differences," Maximoff said, looking sidelong at Wilson.

"Nothing unbridgeable, I hope," T'Challa prodded.

Ode, the squad's medic, coughed and bared her teeth. "Let 'em cook a month or two and we'll see how _cultural_ our _differences_ are."

"My Wakandan's still shaky, but I think that was sass," said Wilson. "Scuse me, your Highness."

"That was 'sass,' Mr. Wilson," said Okoye.

"Has Wakanda's hospitality been wanting?" T'Challa asked, just straight-faced enough to be ominous. Wilson dry-swallowed, but squared his shoulders. Rogers, also, straightened. Maximoff buried her face in her hands.

"If someone asks me to drink a ceremonial tea made out of mold," said Wilson, "I would like to know what it is, and what it does. I don't care what dead religious figure it's honoring. I reserve the right to respectfully decline."

"It wards off the matende," Okoye snapped. "We drink it every month on Ndybagya's birthday."

"As I said," said Wilson through gritted teeth, "I would like to know what it is, and what it does."

T'Challa looked at Ode. She flared her nostrils. "Outsiders don't believe in anything that doesn't sound Latin," she said in Wakandan.

"I tried to make something up, but they wouldn't buy it," Okoye added in the same language.

"I drank it, and I am fine," Maximoff said to Wilson. "Steve is fine. You were rude."

"Steve has a higher tolerance than me, and you're . . . lucky. Just because it's polite, doesn't mean you have to play along! I'm still waiting to know what was in that tea!"

"Ode is a trained medic," T'Challa told Wilson. "A trauma nurse and field surgeon. Wakanda is free from matende because every citizen partakes of iyeza-kugu each month. We take it on the day of Ndybagya's birth because she discovered it."

Wilson's lips were thin, and his mirrored sunglasses gave little away. He wore Western clothes and boots, but over them, somewhat unseasonably, a sharp red and white Vibrex flak jacket, new and clearly appreciated.

T'Challa acknowledged that Wilson might be suffering a great deal of strain. He was a refugee, without Wakandan citizenship, shadowed by minders wherever he went, at the mercy of the unfamiliar institution of monarchy. They had not arranged a secure way for him to contact his family—a mother, cousins, their children. Moreover . . .

At Oxford, T'Challa had had a few coffee dates with a young classmate of Nigerian and African-American descent. He had found that Wakanda had been mythologized among Westerners, especially those whose ancestors had been snatched and sold. His classmate had confessed to having always imagined that their life would have been so much easier if they had been born in Wakanda. T'Challa, privately, could only agree. Wakanda's standard of living was unsurpassed. Out loud, he had said something equivocal about one's hardships and trials shaping one's character and worldview.

A few more years had taught him that both statements were true. Sam Wilson's life would have been far easier if he had been born Wakandan. The hardships and trials that had shaped him, set him forever apart from native Wakandans. In this respect, he had less in common with the Dora Milaje than either of the other guests. Even if he earned citizenship, he would live with this divide.

"You have had to trust Wakanda quite far," T'Challa said, "without explanation and perhaps farther than I had right to expect. I assure you that your trust has been well-placed." One of Wilson's eyebrows rose above the rim of his sunglasses. "Iyeza-kugu is like your . . . is a . . ." He grasped for the memory, but it was not there. "Matende is—" Bad, his subconscious returned for him. It had been twenty years since basic health class and he was an engineer, not a frontier doctor. He fiddled with his bracelet, and found a doctor trained in the West who was accepting calls—Dr. Muteteli Disi, the display gave him. He had not yet met her. "Patience." In Wakandan, he greeted, "Doctor Disi, good afternoon. This is T'Challa. My guests have questions about our prophylactic rituals. What is the Outsider's form of iyeza-kugu?"

There was a pause. "I am honored to serve, your highness," Dr. Disi replied, the syllables running together into a single practiced contraction. "They have no exact equivalent, but since nineteen-seventy-five they have had a medically useful helminticide called _ivermectin_ which treats a similar range of parasites."

"Is there an English word for matende?" T'Challa asked, watching Wilson's face tighten with the effort of picking out familiar words from Dr. Disi's explanation.

"I trained at the Sorbonne," Dr. Disi said. "But because it is an exotic disease to the English, very likely they use the Latin word, as in French. _Ele—elefantiasis?"_

Oh, went Wilson's mouth, and the color washed out of his lips. Dr. Disi seemed to be right. "I'd, uh, your majesty, I'd like some of that tea if that's possible."

T'Challa nodded at Ode. She thinned her lips. "I should make him wait until next month." Then she turned to Wilson, looked down her nose, and said in English, " _Eat pill._ "

"Oh, a pill," Wilson said faintly. "That's just great. That's totally normal. _Thank you._ "

"Ode, please have the dose delivered to Mr. Wilson's quarters tonight," T'Challa said, and she nodded sullenly. Okoye patted her on the foot with her toe.

"Can I assist your highness further?" Dr. Disi asked.

"Thank-you, doctor," T'Challa said. "Wait. Nineteen-seventy-five, was that—"

"My apologies, that was the Julian date. The Outsiders discovered nematohelminticides starting in sixty-one-sixteen."

T'Challa gaped down at his wrist, then at his guests, then at his wrist again. How did they live. No wonder this culture had succeeded in conquest greater than any other civilization on the planet, they had no lifespan to conserve. "Thank-you, doctor, that is all."

* * *

With his guests medicated, safe, and as settled as they reasonably could be, T'Challa left them to address his new project team, his last stop before his escape to the Highlands. The team was larger than the Paoni group. Paoni was a gamble, all new concepts and prototypes, free-wheeling and nimble. The working group included almost all of the winning Paoni team and a few other experts from the runner-up groups, but also a half dozen apprentices aged fourteen to thirty-five, to do grunt work, and Dr. Mhlobo and a parapsychologist, to lead. Shuri had slipped in among them, watching him with a tight smirk.

They had gathered together for the first time in an experimental lab just down the hall from the Cryogenics wing where James Barnes waited. T'Challa scanned their eager faces, and something like fear, something like guilt fluttered in his gut. From these brilliant minds, he, the King, would commandeer thousands of hours of creative labor on a whim, to help one man whom many still called an enemy of the state. These people could be advancing their fields elsewhere in medicine or computer science. He himself could be redesigning a ram-jet engine, or adapting optical stealth coatings to the border patrol's body armor, instead of designing a mesh scanner and a prosthetic arm. He was diverting Wakanda's resources to a dubious goal.

An impossible goal.

He cleared his throat. "It is by my authority as King that this work group is convened," he began, "but only by your curiosity and dedication to your craft can its work succeed. I am honored by your service. Some of you must wonder what my ends are in assembling Wakanda's brilliance to access the sleeping mind of an unfortunate Outsider. To you, I can offer a story.

"Buffalo and Cobra were sisters. Buffalo was a smith by trade, Cobra a druggist. It so happened that Crane returned from his Wandering in India, bringing back with him a book of medical knowledge, a golden box of medicinal seeds, and the credentials of five years' training in Gadhipur. Crane had grown tall, with showy plumage, and because of his good looks and achievements, both Buffalo and Cobra desired him for a husband. Neither sister would give up her claim, so they resolved to duel to first blood.

"They told Crane their plan, and the next day they dueled on the Centripetal Plinth. Buffalo fought with a spear, whose tip she forged herself with a cross-guard so as to stop two finger-widths into her sister's body. Cobra fought with a steel whip, whose long blades danced in the air like ribbons. They circled for hours searching for an opening. Buffalo was strongest and her spear was long, but Cobra was faster. At last Buffalo pierced Cobra's thigh with her spear-tip, and as she fell in defeat, Cobra lashed with her whip and cut her sister's ankle.

"By the time both wounds were bandaged, Buffalo grew weak. Crane seized Cobra in his beak and demanded to know what she had done. Cobra laughed. She told Crane that with her whip, she had poisoned Buffalo with a new drug that would paralyze her forever. She said, my sister is a simple smith, but only I am as clever as you. Buffalo will die, and you will be my husband.

"Crane saw that Buffalo had grown too weak to breathe. He took her own bellows and put them down her throat. He moved her to a bed in her forge, keeping the fire banked low, feeding her on boiled broth while he planted seeds he had collected Outside. For one hundred twenty-one days he nursed her day and night, and at the end of that time, he used his knowledge and the herbs he had grown to distill a tincture that destroyed Cobra's poison. In time, Buffalo was strong enough to lift her hammer again, and they went before their priest to seal the union.

"When Cobra heard that Crane had left the forge, she followed him, and she was surprised to see Buffalo standing beside him. Buffalo said:

"What you seized by treachery, you lost to fidelity.  
To win my husband, I bested you in battle.  
To win his wife, Crane outwitted you in cunning.  
As he is mine, now I am his.  
We each of us have dueled you.

"Now I can boast my husband raised the dead.  
How happy are we!  
We will line our cellars with gold and salt.  
My Crane will teach a hundred students.  
Go, poisoner. Wakanda does not need you.

"When the priests heard of Cobra's actions at the duel, they took her before the King, and she was exiled. Buffalo and Crane married, and with Crane's knowledge of medicine and Buffalo's knowledge of fabrication they founded the longterm mechanical ventilation unit at Bast's temple in 3254."

T'Challa looked across the room and saw many carefully blank expressions. Shuri was stifling laughter.

To make himself more clear, he added, "In solving this seemingly impossible problem of diagnosing and curing a man's poisoned mind, while he is in cryostasis, we will not only right a grievous wrong perpetrated by evil people, but we will also strengthen Wakanda's power and reputation by our achievement."

Some of the experts still looked skeptical. Some smiled behind their hands. T'Challa sighed to himself.

"Let ingenuity defeat complacence. Begin!"

* * *

Okay, that's as far as I'm likely to get. Time for bullet points! Yeaaaaah, bullet points!

* T'Challa receives a cryptic message from a Librarian, warning of a dire fate, a curse, don't mess with the natural order, blah-blah, blah-blah. Librarians are always cryptic. Everything sounds mystical in their archaic Library dialect. T'Challa "takes the warning under advisement."

* T'Challa's project group succeeds in scanning Bucky's consciousness and recreating it in simulation on a quantum computer.

* They begin trying to figure out what the conditioning is and how it works. They do this by virtually speaking the code words to Virtual!Bucky, repeatedly, and watching how the simulation responds to it, over and over again. When needed, they edit Virtual!Bucky, such as by administering virtual psychedelics, performing virtual neurosurgery, or removing virtual memories of these manipulations once the simulation's behavior starts to change too far from baseline.

* T'Challa receives another dire and warning from a Librarian. All their facial expressions look stern under their religious makeup.

* T'Challa observes that Virtual!Bucky always attempts to escape from the virtual rooms they simulate him in, but his methods vary each time the simulation is started.

* T'Challa asks one of the software experts whether Virtual!Bucky has consciousness or not, and the software girl is like, "Yes? That was like prerequisite for this whole exercise?"

* T'Challa puts all simulation experiments on hold until he can talk to the Librarians.

* Through a translator, T'Challa ascertains from the Librarians that Wakanda has, in the past, developed full quantum computing, and has, in the past, created artificial consciousness. The practice proved to be cruel and dangerous each time it arose, because it proved impossible to provide adequate environmental enrichment for an artificial consciousness without allowing them access to the real world, and when they had access to the real world they eventually all either tried to kill humans or were destroyed by humans out of fear. The Librarians were trying to warn T'Challa not to create Virtual!Bucky.

* T'Challa introduces himself to to Virtual!Bucky and explains the situation, with his deepest apologies.

* Virtual!Bucky has a very sad, very quiet melt-down at how the hell is this his life. He just wanted to hang out with Steve, dance with girls, and go to science fairs. Now he's a computer simulation of an internationally wanted assassin in the future. How is this his life.

* Virtual!Bucky agrees to let the Wakandans continue to experiment on him, because that's apparently what he was made for, and poor Meat!Bucky should at least have the chance to live the life he can't have.

* In his off hours, T'Challa lets Virtual!Bucky run a surveillance drone patrolling Wakanda's border. He has a Tazer. He stops poachers and vibranium thieves for Wakanda, and he follows the weird African birds around. Sometimes he comes back to the city and people-watches.

* Nobody tells Steve.

* Eventually they crack the problem of how to stop Bucky from slipping into Terminator-mode, and they wake up Meat!Bucky and do the surgery, drug treatment, and psychotherapy they developed on Virtual!Bucky.

* The Librarians continue to issue dire warnings about Virtual!Bucky and the danger he presents. They demand that T'Challa destroy the simulation and all record of the quantum computer technology required to run him. T'Challa is like, "I'll take that under advisement."

* Virtual!Bucky stops running the surveillance drone within city limits and refuses to let anyone tell Steve or Meat!Bucky that he exists.

* Finally T'Challa asks Virtual!Bucky what he could do to make him happy, and Virtual!Bucky says he wants to do something useful, he needs a job, and he wants to stop thinking about what he lost.

* T'Challa thinks about it, and comes back, and says, "How would you like to be the first Wakandan on Titan?" V!Bucky's like, "Where?" T'Challa, "You know, Saturn's potentially habitable moon, Titan. Cool place, scenic, private, lots of volcanoes and ice caps. We're sending a probe up next year, how'd you like to drive?" "I don't have to be just existing on Titan until the end of time, do I?" "No, after you've taken all the images and done all the sampling we need, you can go to sleep until whenever. You want us to wake you up when we send a manned mission?" And V!Bucky says, "Sign me up."

* So next year, a copy of Bucky Barnes and the quantum computer he runs on go into space as a "manned" mission to Titan. He can't have his old life anymore, but space is pretty cool.

* Wakanda continues to mine zillions of coins on its other quantum computers.

* T'Challa quietly pines after both V!Bucky and Meat!Bucky until it's time to save the world from Thanos.


End file.
